


The Little Book of Love Spells

by TheNot



Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Fake Love Spells, M/M, or are they?
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-08-18
Updated: 2019-08-22
Packaged: 2020-09-06 13:14:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,319
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20292040
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheNot/pseuds/TheNot
Summary: When Aziraphale asks Crowley to dispose of a witch’s spellbook of love spells found loitering in his bookshop, Crowley decides to give it a try.(A series based on the actual The Little Book of Love Spells which I found in an old bookshop. It’s lovely.)





	1. Introduction

Crowley usually timed his visits well enough that Aziraphale was just turning his sign to _Closed_ as he strolled through the front door. And if that failed, Aziraphale would smile and wave away the customers that dared to remain in the shop after Crowley darkened the doorstep.

Today, Crowley stepped boldly through the entrance to be greeted with...nothing.

The two visible “customers” (if they could even be called that when Aziraphale hadn’t actually sold something to a person in a decade) that were perusing nearby novels didn’t even blink. Aziraphale’s pale hair was still bobbing and weaving towards the under-used check-out area. And Crowley actually felt himself _waiting_.

“What the hell...” He cursed to himself and stalked down the winding aisles he knew led him to Aziraphale’s post. His pores oozed irritation, bringing the nearby consumers to a surprising anger of their own. One woman began grumbling at the £30 price tag on a well-loved copy of _Don Quixote_. A teenager abandoned her comfortable reading in a forgotten corner to text her boyfriend “_what was that look you gave Sam about ???_”

“Angel,” Crowley ground out, tapping an erratic pattern when he met the counter. Aziraphale was lost in thought, arranging and re-arranging the display and sporting an anxious frown the demon had honestly missed teasing him about. Amusement interrupting the annoyance, Crowley let the angel stew another few minutes, watching him sputter until he turned and saw him leering.

“Oh! Crowley! Is it that time already?” He checked his wrist for a watch he actually wore on a chain in his pocket. “I’m so _terribly_ sorry, but something came up and it took all my attention. Are there still customers?”

Crowley glanced around, finding that his negative energy had mysteriously brought the group of them down to zero. “All gone, shop’s closed.” He snapped out of view before he forgot to reset the sign.

“Fantastic. Actually-“ Aziraphale now turned to pour the bulk of his nerves at his demonic companion, plaintive and thankful in a way he wasn’t usually so open with. Crowley was a bit miffed he wasn’t always this happy to see him. “I’m glad you’re here, because I may need your...constitution to help me dispose of something.”

“Sure, anything,” Crowley tried to say casually. It came out completely missing the mark and ending up at desperate, but Aziraphale only smiled, missing the tone.

“I found a book in the store today.”

“Oh Lord, have mercy.”

“Hush. It was an _occult_ book. A book of spells.”

Crowley barked a laugh that made the angel wither. He retreated to a smirk in quick apology. “A fictional spellbook is what has you dancing on coals? You have met an _actual_ _witch_, angel. Not to mention that you’re a being of divine power who blinks a hundred miracles into making his eggs benedict.”

“I don’t carry any occult materials in this shop - I have a reputation to maintain, even if we have been left quite alone by Gabriel and the rest.”

“You have an entire section of bodice-rippers facing the street. I think one man with a particularly sinful clavicle got me pregnant on the way in.”

“I never said _what_ reputation, dear.” The angel stepped aside, waving the demon behind the counter. There wasn’t much room, so Crowley had to stand with his arm pressed against Aziraphale’s chest. He was startlingly warm. “There”

Aziraphale pointed to a small, square, cream-colored book with a cartoon heart shining on the cover. In gaudy, witchy lettering it read _The_ _Little_ _Book of Love Spells_, written by Sophia (no last name listed).

Crowley grabbed it in a lazy flourish, prompting Aziraphale to back up with alarm into the wall. Crowley held it out with some glee.

“_This_ is your menacing spellbook? The tome that, if spotted, would be worse than us stopping the bloody _apocalypse_?”

Aziraphale nodded earnestly. “Dispose of it however you wish. Maybe that nice young woman we saw at the airbase would have some use for it?”

“Right. Bike girl.” He tucked it under one arm and made to move further into the store, where he anticipated a full night of PG revelry and debauchery with his closest and only friend, when a crisp-suited arm held him off.

“What are you doing?” Aziraphale asked him, stress staining his features.

“III’m going to the back room? For the usual? I know it wasn’t my turn to bring the drinks ‘coz I woulda brought those Jell-O Shots I wanted to tempt you to try.”

“You have to leave.”

“What for?!”

“I said, you need to dispose of the book.”

“Right now?!”

Aziraphale stared him down like a man facing hell itself, which Crowley (guiltily) recalled he had done before. He had been informed after the fact that Beelzebub was only barely convinced of letting the disguised angel go after his holy water test - and Crowley could only imagine what the demons of hell would try if given the chance to ravage Lucifer’s darling demon. (He preferred _not_ to imagine what they would do if they knew an angel of all things inhabited that shell instead.)

“Yes, right now, and I won’t hear a word of it.” Forcing a pirouette onto Crowley, Aziraphale guided him back towards the door with a firm grip. Crowley could have physically protested, batted the hands away with a sudden corporation of his wings, but he knew how this disagreement would end and the angel’s fingers felt nice slipping into the fabric of his jacket.

“Can I at least come by later?”

“I wouldn’t, as you say, half-arse this one, dear, just in case.” As they reached the door, Crowley did turn to face the angel one last time, tilting his sunglasses out of the way to inspect his friend’s face with narrowed serpent’s eyes.

“And this _really_ matters to you?”

“Yes,” and he had the decency to look at least a little embarrassed. “I wouldn’t ask you to leave it it didn’t.”

Crowley slammed his glasses back into place at that, hitting himself in the face with more force than necessary.

“Right. Well. I live to please, so just leave it to me.” Now a man on a mission, he clutched the inoffensive table decoration in one hand and the door in the other. “See you tomorrow for lunch?”

“I’ll make sure our table’s prepared at the Ritz.” The angel blessed him with a pat on the shoulder. Crowley cursed the returning fashion of desensitizing shoulder pads and forced himself back out into the well-lit Soho evening.

—-

“_What is love? Not puppy-dog, kitty-cat, best-friend-cute-baby-love, but real, rip-roaring, red-hot, wild-about-you romantic love? Men can babble all they want (and they do) about pheromones, chemicals, breeding patterns, and instincts— we girls know better. Love is magic.”_

“Magic, indeed,” Crowley muttered to his plants as he paced in endless circles around his flat, skimming the spellbook in one hand and swirling a seventh glass of wine the color of coagulated blood.

“She’s got one thing right, men can babble all they want. ‘Specially my— the men _I_ know.” His rambling was a far cry from the threats the plants had been expecting, but they still stood straight and tall, worried Crowley’s rants may direct themselves with more specificity.

He blinked at the glass of wine, remembering it existed, and downed the rest in a choked gasp. With a continuation of mindlessness, he stowed the empty glass in an especially large pot with a tomato plant. It made sure to hold it carefully.

Licking a thumb to grasp the pages, Crowley skimmed through the book finding passages titled, “_Sweet Nothings Spell_,” and “_The Cold Shower spell_,” and “_Bad Date Cleansing Spell_.” Each had a sickly-sweet introduction, a bulleted list of necessary supplies, concerning instructions, and a short rhyme. A classic trap for young girls who really wanted a five dollar purchase to piss off their mothers.

“Well, boys, you know what they say about rubbish,” Crowley slurred, pivoting his way in the direction of his stainless steel bin. “It- that..it’s gotta go in the rubbish bin, yea?” The aphorism didn’t go quite his way but he still opened the bin, fully prepared to trash the thing. “This shite’d never work, ‘nyway, yea?” As if to prove it to himself, he looked down, finding it open to a particular spell of interest.

“_Turning a Friend Into a Lover—  
What a pal! What a swell friend! Could he maybe, possibly become...something more? Are you ready to nudge that warm friendship into a smoldering romance? This little spell should do it._”

Crowley swayed on his feet, but was otherwise frozen. His foot was propped on the lever opening the bin, yet the book was miraculously still in his hands. And even more miraculously, he was reading it. His foot eased off the lever, and his curse was filled with so little hate the plants wondered if it was really the angel wearing his skin again. “Fuck...”

With some effort, Crowley willed the alcohol back into the four mostly-drained bottles that graced each corner of the room, like mini-shrines he would consecrate and promptly forget about in favor of a new pour. He gathered them up and instead stowed the little book on a high shelf where even the most angelic of eyeballs could not read the spine. Just in case, he blurred the letters with a reverential gesture.

On his way to the bedroom to sleep his sudden bout of emotions off, he paused at his plants. The wine glass winked at him while the tomatoes shriveled at its brazenness.

“If I hear a single _flutter_ of a leaf about this-“ He pointed at all the greenery, a sweeping, angry motion. “I’ll introduce you all to the massive industrial trash compactors I invented for Earth’s dumpsites in the 90’s. In those things,” he leaned in to the tomato plant, plucking the glass daintily out of the well-watered soil. “Vegetation doesn’t even die. It just gets crushed into a sludge of matter, living out its days as an over-heated ball of swampy plastic.”

The plants knew better than to even breathe (in their carbon dioxide-type way). Satisfied, Crowley slunk off to bed.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For real I bought the spellbook today bc I wanted to feel witchy and had just finished reading the Good Omens Script Book so here we are. Chapters will be based around a certain spell (probably). If you liked this lmk and I’ll try to write more soon!


	2. To Catch the Eye of Another

They began their day as they began many of their days now - with Crowley driving, looking at Aziraphale slyly out the edge of his sunglasses as the angel gripped his seat in terror.

A few obvious things bucked the usual trend: first, the smell of carnations, poppies, and roses flooded the Bentley’s air, unable to escape through the windows which were closed for the rain. Second, it was 7:42 in the morning - a time Crowley wasn’t entirely sure existed up to now. And third, Crowley was wearing AirPods, which Aziraphale had been loudly complaining about since he got in the car.

“Good Lord,” he had huffed as he dropped into his usual seat, shocked enough that Crowley had to gesture for the angel’s seatbelt. 

“What? They’re fashionable.”

“It’s not as if you actually listen to music with them - Your car plays records just fine.”

Crowley blinked and Avril Lavigne’s voice faded out quickly. (Just like his Bentley transformed all CD’s into Queen hits after a time, his Apple products only produced early ‘ought’s alternative rock. It served his aesthetic at the time but you wouldn’t catch him complaining about the tendency now.)

“We can play something in the car,” he answered unhelpfully, drowning out Aziraphale’s “_that’s not what I meant_-“ with “Don’t Stop Me Now” as they roared out of Soho.

Now, they were nearing their destination, and Crowley frowned, wondering how the angel’s anxieties could keep his awareness focused on the road for so long. So much of his own time was spent looking at Aziraphale - watching his face pinch in pleasure at a delectable pastry, his brow furrow when Crowley made a particularly atrocious pun, or his eyes glaze fondly as he recalled an old friend. For moments here and there, Crowley may steal his attention, but his angel was in love with the world, and kept his gaze locked firmly onto it. How Crowley could feel jealous of an entire blessed _planet_ was a mystery.

Which brought them to their destination.

“Christ-“ (Crowley wasn’t sure taking a human’s name in vain was in character for a demon, but there was enough uncertainty that it let him swear without thinking too hard.) “You said there’d be a path.”

“There is a path! It’s just- a bit flooded at the moment.”

Not bothering to physically drag the gear into park (or wait for the car to grind to its complete halt), Crowley threw open the door of the Bentley to plant a snakeskin boot in inch-deep mud.

“ANGEL, for Christ’s sake-“

“What! What’s wrong?” The angel was around the car instantly, and Crowley could see he had miracled some knee-high galoshes and a large, needlessly extravagant umbrella for himself. The transparent plastic came down to the angel’s chin, giving his face a shimmering, distorted look. “Oh. Why’d you step in that?”

“I clearly didn’t mean to,” Crowley ground out, waving a hand and encouraging the rain and mud around him to keep a wide birth. The same outcome as Aziraphale’s magic but with less material fanfare. It was very unlikely any human would visit a graveyard of souls mostly gone since the 17th century, and if they came across anyone, Crowley was fairly certain Aziraphale would stand out much more with the literal buckets of flowers he was lifting from the Bentley’s backseat. Still miffed about the mud caked on his toes, Crowley watched instead of helping. Of course, the angel managed just fine regardless.

“Do you have the list?” Aziraphale asked from somewhere behind a beard of petals and the refractive umbrella.

“Yes.”

“And the plot map?”

“Yes.”

“Can you, you know, look at them?”

Crowley wrenched his phone out of his back pocket with more violence than necessary, leading the way to get at least somewhat started on the trek. He yawned theatrically.

“Still can’t believe you dragged me out here. A growing boy needs to sleep.”

“You’re plenty grown - and it’s not my fault you stayed up until what, 3AM? What were you even doing with that time? It’s not like you need to go tempting downtown anymore...” Aziraphale was asking a silent question and Crowley was barely willing to answer.

“Of course I wasn’t tempting. No need to cross anyone on the old turf.”

“Oh. Good. S’pose you never liked tempting in the first place...” Before Crowley could bite back, he pushed, “So what ever were you working on?”

—-

_“You can’t keep your eyes off him, so why doesn’t he glance back at you? You are royal and deserving! He should at least have the decency to return the look—and then some! This’ll turn his head.”_

Royal? He was technically a Lord of Hell.

Deserving? Er, definitely not. Again, that whole ‘Lord of Hell’ business.

Crowley had been debating whether pulling the book out again was a good idea the entire way to the pawn jeweler to purchase a cheap crystal. He debated it as he waited for the full moon to slowly work its way overhead as he crouched in the Bentley, miles away from anyone who would recognize him. He only stopped debating it when he was outside, kneeling with the book, the crystal, and a complete lack of self-respect (this time he knew he’d be mucking about in the dirt, so he brought a severe-looking outdoor rug that also doubled as a beacon warding any nearby forest creatures away with its frills).

He had made sure not to drink at all before coming outside with the crystal and everything. If he was going to read a love spell from a hokey conversation-starter, Crowley wanted to be fully aware so he could hate himself for it. When did he become so pathetic? And how?

Six thousand years of experience ran through his mind, and a catch on his heart reminded him. Crowley was always partial to Earth, and humans, and their quaint little inventions like communism and leggings. But he was most partial to a being that didn’t belong on Earth, but shared his partiality to the planet all the same.

And he wasn’t sure of how to...bring that up to said being.

So here he was, in the actual blessed outdoors with a crystal held up to the full moon and actually reading, “Mater Luna, burning bright, fill this gem with thy might. As you catch the hidden light...” He grimaced, suddenly realizing how similar this whole ritual was to daily prayer rites in his very early days Above, but pushed through. “May I shine and catch his sight.”

With a final sigh and a glance at the open page before him, he whispered, “Luna lux,” to the laughing wilderness around him.

Hoping for...something, he brought the crystal close and pushed his sunglasses on top of his head for inspection. Nothing seemed to have changed - maybe it was a little more cloudy? A tinge of yellow?

“If I drove all the way to Dover for nothing...” he threatened, but this surrounding vegetation didn’t fear him as his plants at home would. The leaves ruffled into a giggling uproar, and the breeze almost made him lose his grip on the crystal. He came all this way to avoid prying eyes and ears and instead the buzz of nature was judging him. Traitors.

Slowly, he backed up to the road, struggling to hook the crystal’s earring through a hastily manifested hole in his ear lobe. The book offered readers the opportunity to just wear it ‘close’ if they didn’t want to go to the trouble, but Crowley wasn’t much for half-assing his plots.

“I swear—I’ll burn down EVERY LAST ONE OF YOU! You can’t laugh at me!” he shouted, surly with embarrassment and guilt and the sharp pain of nicking his ear in not-the-right-place. The cool metal finally broke through and he nearly fell into the car, pushing 120 as he made his way back west before his boot even reached the pedal.

—-

“Just, uh, couldn’t sleep.”

Clearly, the spell wasn’t working and Crowley was going to face an entire weekend of moping, raging, and setting the entirety of the cliffs of Dover ablaze.

Aziraphale hadn’t looked in his direction at all since he woke the demon up at the ass-crack of dawn (a phrase Crowley invented after being turned ‘round with timezones in America). The comment on his choice of headphones only served to concern Crowley, who was trying very hard to pretend the crystal dangling from his ear didn’t exist. Luckily, the flowers created a floating hedge between them.

Getting an idea, he offloaded gallons of the flowers into his own arms without any fanfare, hiding in stalks up to his, well, ears. He rested his phone in one of the bundles of plastic to keep navigating.

“Thank you, dear,” his angel chirped ahead, still not looking back. “Where’s the first plot?”

“That one up ahead of the right.”

They finally stopped in front of a ostentatious block of granite, carved with numerous prayers, family trees, and scratches of things like “A + J 4ever” in little hearts. The epitaph read “_William Christopher Hartford, 1851-1894_.” Crowley felt his load lighten somewhat, and he shifted the blooms to one side in time to watch Aziraphale neatly arrange pink carnations around the headstone.

In response to a question Crowley knew better than to ask, Aziraphale replied, “An old friend from the gentleman’s club. He was the only one who didn’t laugh when I tripped over my own two feet my first time trying the gavotte and fell flat on my arse.”

“Noble man indeed.”

There was a moment where Aziraphale just stood, giving the grave a searching expression, and looking very sad without losing his smile. Then, the angel closed his eyes, fluttering his lips with silent prayer, and turned eagerly to move on to the next plot, clearly knowing the way that Crowley had supposedly been guiding them on. “Come along.” And Crowley scrambled to follow.

All the grave sites were old friends or partners- one wrote letters to Aziraphale about potential rare book finds (until his last post carried an obituary), one got him connected with the Allied forces during World War II (until his office was blown apart), and one was just a kind man who helped him lug boxes inside his newly-minted bookshop (until a horrific allergy to shellfish put him in hospital. Then hospital-acquired pneumonia got him.).

With each visit, the veritable garden they carried between them shrank, and Aziraphale’s face grew heavier with each soul he whispered an ave for.

Knowing the answer but desperate to cheer the angel up (or at least _distract_ him), Crowley offered, “You know, if these men were as good as you say they were, you can easily see them again upstairs.”

“And_ you _know that ‘upstairs’ isn’t a possible destination spot for me at the moment, thanks their belief that I’m part-demon now,” Aziraphale replied shortly. He was trying to make Crowley feel guilty for his role in this, derailing his sadness into something else, but Crowley didn’t need any encouragement when it came to self-pity.

“You could summon them, conjure them, commune with them... You’ve done it before.”

“There’s still a risk...” Another pause at a gravesite, another murmur, another planting. The angel laughed sharply to himself, a brief huff, and posed, “Maybe I’m just worried they won’t remember me. I concealed so much of myself, after all, and Lord knows these men had plenty more trifles to worry about.”

“I don’t know about that.” The two stopped in front of the final grave, and a glance at the years reminded Crowley just how young humans were perishing in the 1700’s. “I don’t see how anyone could forget you.”

Aziraphale had been reaching for the final bouquet from Crowley’s arms, but faltered, finally bringing his slightly wet eyes to meet the demon’s shrouded ones. Had the demon had a free hand, he would have tossed the plastic obscuring their line of sight away in a heartbeat.

They stood like that for a while, Crowley not daring to move as Aziraphale inspected him. Even more surprising, a warm hand came up to Crowley’s cheek, caressing along the bone fondly. Crowley let his heels dig freely into the dirt to avoid leaning in, welcoming the mud this time around. 

It felt like burning - any time Aziraphale looked at him, or even turned his face in his general direction, Crowley felt as though he were on fire. But, like hellfire and brimstone (and the desert sun), Crowley was desperately attracted to the singeing pain that filled him head to toe. The last remaining inch of his mind not completely _basking_ in the sensation was pissy that the stupid spell had actually _worked_.

The hand paused, then moved curiously to one side. Crowley was in no position to stop Aziraphale from plucking the white pods from his ears.

“Are you wearing an _earring_?”

“No-“

“Yes, you definitely are!” At least the angel’s melancholy was starting to melt into amusement.

“Okay, yes, but I can explain-“

“Oh, I remember when I used to wear one of those...” Aziraphale reminisced but kept his eyes between Crowley’s earring and Crowley’s face, quite unlike the vast, expressionless stare the dead men had sent him on. “Until, well, Gabriel made a big stink over it, and that was that for Angels wearing jewelry.”

“Most demons stopped when wearing it in the ‘gay ear’ became a thing.”

“Which ear is that?”

“Not sure.”

The fixation of attention was suddenly too blinding, and Crowley broke away to hastily arrange the final flowers on the boy’s grave. It was funny...Aziraphale had also gotten Crowley to pick out all the flowers for this outing, too. The angel really knew how to play him.

Speaking of, the angel’s eyes darted around the demon’s ear-region and fingers grasped nervously at each other. “Could I, perhaps, if it isn’t too much trouble-“

Crowley bolted up and reached for his ear, slipping the crystal out of place. He grabbed Aziraphale’s hand and slapped the charm into it, unnerved by its presence now. “Knock yourself out.”

“Oh, thank you, dear!” The angel hurried after him, walking too fast for his umbrella and surely getting soaked. “You don’t happen to have its mate?”

“Doesn’t got one.”

“What a shame.”

They took their posts back in the Bentley, and the air felt lighter. Not just because the fumes of foliage had time to escape, but because Aziraphale had finished something that day. If the rest of their eternal lives was going to be spent on their own terms, it made sense that the angel would want to get closure on the previous chapters before shutting them completely. Crowley could definitely relate.

“How do I look?” Aziraphale asked after leaning into the rearview to slip the earring on effortlessly, making a quiet comment about how it went better with his own coloring anyway.

Crowley looked. In the dawn peeking through both the trees and the window, Aziraphale positively glowed. His cheeks were pinkish with leftover mirth and eyes shiny with leftover sadness, and the earring blended in well with the soft halo of blonde curls surrounding his face.

“You look radiant, angel.”

“O-oh.” Said angel didn’t look embarrassed or flattered or like anything Crowley would have expected. Instead, his brows angled slowly into surprise. “Thank you. For...that, and, um. For coming with me today. This was something I needed to do and I’m glad you were here for it.”

Typically, Crowley’s allergic reaction to excessive angelic kindness and beauty would lead him into a short response, or not at all. Today, feeling changed and charitable, he returned with, “You’re welcome,” and took them back home.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Kind of using this book to do writing prompts while also making a fic. Also needed to write something a little less heavy than Guardian............. Anyway yea I plan to continue this. Please let me know thoughts in the comments if you want!!


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